Jeff Koons is thought to be the most commercially successful living artist in the world. He is also one of the most controversial and contentious; yet conversely is lauded by dealers and collectors for his major contribution to contemporary art history.

Considered the ‘king of kitsch’ by naysayers and not beloved of art critics, sales of his pieces have beaten their own world records for the most expensive work by any living artist.

Best known for his metal sculptures of balloon dogs and everyday objects, Jeff Koons takes industrially-made articles, strips them of their practical use and re-presents them as art icons. He plays with themes of banality, mass-appeal and commerce with arguably greater showmanship, and on a grander scale, than any artist before him.

Koons is a master of spectacle. He takes inspiration from things you might find at a yard sale; inflatable plastic toys, vacuum cleaners, porcelain trinkets - and monumentally devolves them using the visual language of advertising, marketing, and the entertainment industry. He has in the past, also shocked with grandiose pornographic statements created with his former wife, Ilona Staller aka Cicciolina, the Hungarian-Italian porn star and politician.He flaunts superficies, exalts the mundane and applauds the ridiculousness of consumer culture which rewards him back with an insatiable appetite for his works which have made beyond $58million at auction.

Within the art world, Koons’ is said to be a neo-pop or post-Pop artist, a trailblazer for a trend that surfaced in the 1980s as a reaction to the minimalist and conceptualist art favoured before it. With his own stated artistic intention to “communicate with the masses,” Koons was among the first American artists to cast himself as a ‘populist’ and his message resonated hugely with audiences jaded by perceived art world snobbery. His outspoken distaste for abstract art and his embrace of bad taste paradoxically won over the most discerning and ostensibly elitist audiences.

But how were we won over when Koons openly rejects the notion of any hidden meaning or irony in his artwork? When you see one of his pieces in the flesh, especially in the beautifully curated context of for instance, the Whitney Museum’s massive 2014 Koons retrospective, it overwhelms you with its size, presence and most strikingly, its depthlessness. It’s esteemed bling, but it’s Jeff Koons bling with his identity in every curious, whimsical object. Whether it’s the massive, shining titanium balloon animals of the ‘Celebration’ series or the pristine porcelain statuary of Michael Jackson and his pet monkey, Bubbles, Koons’s works are immediately recognizable, even if their sincerity remains unclear.

What is profound is how heavily involved in the making of his art Jeff Koons actually is. A technologist as much as he is an artist, even if he doesn’t have a hand in the physical making of his works, he is personally responsible for the development of multiple cutting-edge fabrication techniques. For every finished piece, standing in glorious perfection in the middle of a gallerist’s white cube or on the wall of a collector’s penthouse apartment, like with every invention, you can be sure there were a dozen failures along the way but he’s never been deterred. With his Gorilla piece, he successfully recreated the texture and feeling of a cheap wax toy, in solid granite, and at an awesome scale, yet most of his endeavours have been follybecause for nearly his entire career Koons’s perfectionism has caused him to lose money on many, if not most, of the pieces he sells.

Maybe this has been strangely intentional, because the artist, the impresario, wants to make you surrender your critical distance and marvel at the simple truth, that is, the awe-inspiring workmanship. Taking in the shiny surfaces of the massive sculptures in the Celebration series - the Balloon Dog, say - and you won’t see a single seam or any visible evidence of how the piece was made. Look at the bronze and aluminium copies of blow-up toys, and you’ll swear you could just pop them with a pair of scissors. Koons’ feats of engineering are among the very best the art world has ever seen, precisely because of his incredible level of perfectionism. No one has done anything like his works before him, because the technology didn’t exist, and because the sums of money involved in creating such things are beyond outrageous.

In 2000, Eyestorm exclusively published a series of limited edition prints with Koons titled Cut Out, Loopy and Hair, and they were taken from the artist's 1999 collection of paintings collectively entitled 'Easyfun'. Intricate in design and unreservedly optimistic, the 'Easyfun' paintings marked Jeff Koons' return to exhibiting after several years of closely guarded activity in his studio. The paintings that these editions are based on are so large and complicated that Koons required a team of 40 assistants to complete them. Whilst the coveted editions sold at Eyestorm very quickly at the beginning of the new millennium, a number of them are available by way of private collectors.

Koons’s art might be vacant, it might be trite, but the artist does something very interesting, he looks to turn money into art over and above turning art into money. On a social level his legacy is even greater as he’s the defender, the liberator, of everyday taste. Whatever you like, Koons is telling us, is okay. Over his 30-year career this notion has challenged top collectors and public art museums to revise their notions of what fine art looks like which has been a brilliant marketing strategy as well as an evident turning point in art history. The art of Jeff Koons is both utterly indefensible and utterly compelling as his total embrace of emptiness creates work that is accidently profound, precisely because of all its internal contradictions - and this, it appears is actually something we’re all quite grateful for.

“A city without graffiti is a dead city” and so is the mantra for the man whom street artists and fans call André, Monsieur A, Mr A or Monsieur André. His iconic personal tag of a round-headed cartoon with a devilish grin, top hat and winking eye established him as a breakthrough artist at a time when the alphabet provided the basis of most graffiti art.

After the successful release of Ross Holden’s first screen-print 13 Million Miles (Diamond) in September, Eyestorm is excited to be releasing a second exclusive edition by Holden titled 300 Billion Years (In The Past), representing the continued development of the artist’s work within the screen-print medium.